The Cost of Urban Freeways
SE-SW Freeway, Washington DC (cc photo by dbking)
One of the great mistakes this country made decades ago was to seriously damage a large number of American cities by cutting freeways through existing neighborhoods. How much damage? A 2006 paper by Nathaniel Baum-Snow gives this answer (via Ryan Avent):
Between 1950 and 1990, the aggregate population of central cities in the United States declined by 17 percent despite population growth of 72 percent in metropolitan areas as a whole. This paper assesses the extent to which the construction of new limited access highways has contributed to central city population decline. Using planned portions of the interstate highway system as a source of exogenous variation, empirical estimates indicate that one new highway passing through a central city reduces its population by about 18 percent. Estimates imply that aggregate central city population would have grown by about 8 percent had the interstate highway system not been built.
I wouldn’t say that we shouldn’t have built highways—it’s more that we shouldn’t run highways smack through existing cities or made circumventing existing cities such a priority of the highway system. Connecting one metro area to another with limited access highways makes perfect sense—slicing a city into pieces with limited access highways does not. And when considering these estimates you need to recall that it wasn’t free to build these highways, you could have made alternative infrastructure investments in rail or buses or even just nicer-looking boulevards.
107 Responses to “The Cost of Urban Freeways”
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September 11th, 2009 at 10:07 am
I don’t think you’d like Columbus very much.
September 11th, 2009 at 10:07 am
Your analysis fails to take into account the destruction of poorer and darker-skinned neighborhoods, which was an enormous finger on the plus side of the highway-building balance in the 1950s and 1960s. Things didn’t go quite according to plan–oddly enough, those people didn’t simply disappear–but at least it made their lives more miserable and you can’t put a dollar value on that.
September 11th, 2009 at 10:08 am
Cue Mixmaster in 3… 2… 1…
Cranky
September 11th, 2009 at 10:09 am
I wouldn’t say that we shouldn’t have built highways—it’s more that we shouldn’t run highways smack through existing cities or made circumventing existing cities such a priority of the highway system.
Aren’t those pretty much your choices, if you’re going to “[c]onnect[] one metro area to another with limited access highways”? True, there’s a third one: having highways running from the outskirts of one metro area to the outskirts of another, without any easy way to get from one such highway to another. But that would be a far worse choice than either of the other two.
September 11th, 2009 at 10:12 am
My understanding is that Benton MacKaye, who first proposed the interstate highway system back in the 20s or 30s, had in mind something that Matthew would have approved of. He suggested a network of highways connecting cities, but with fewer accesses outside of cities (which he recognized would lead to sub-urban sprawl) — basically, very long distances between exits, and the focus being on getting people from City A to City B. He also had some related ideas about “wilderness belts” and preserving rural landscapes in corridors between cities.
September 11th, 2009 at 10:12 am
Don’t tell Tyler Cowen
IN Chicago they destroyed a huge Italian community.
September 11th, 2009 at 10:17 am
Rusty- To be fair, nobody likes Columbus very much.
September 11th, 2009 at 10:21 am
I suggest that the freeways, by making it possible to drive into downtown areas quickly, also expanded the cities into much larger metro areas. Of course you may not like this, but you cannot say that the freeways have truly reduced urban population.
September 11th, 2009 at 10:22 am
> Aren’t those pretty much your choices, if you’re
> going to “[c]onnect[] one metro area to another
> with limited access highways”?
Look at some old highway maps from the 1950s/1960s (they run anywhere from 50 cents to a dollar at antique stores). The original plan for the Interstates was to terminate them more or less at the borders of large metro areas, and connect them to existing networks of US highways, state highways, and boulevards serving the existing metro structure.
IIRC it was Richard J. Daley of Chicago who thought that this would eventually lead to too much growth outside the cities proper, and demanded that the Interstates be run straight into and through the cities. This had mixed effects in strong cities such as Chicago: many good neighborhoods were destroyed, as noted, and “escape” to the suburbs became easier, but transport in and around the city itself also improved greatly. But for weaker cities the effects were devastating: it became far easier to move everything out to cornfield belts than to rebuild/reuse within the city limits, and those cities hollowed out fast.
Cranky
September 11th, 2009 at 10:24 am
IN Chicago they destroyed a huge Italian community.
What “destroyed” much of Little Italy in Chicago in the 60s was not the building of an expressway, but the construction of the campus of the University of Illinois Chicago.
September 11th, 2009 at 10:27 am
It also seems to me that if you have cities A, B, and C in a line, you should provide a way for vehicles going from A to C to circumvent B, as opposed to having to use surface streets in B. Yeah, I know the movie Cars says to use the surface streets, but that isn’t such a hot idea when the city in between is a lot bigger than Radiator Springs.
On the other hand, I agree the idea of using highways to provide access into the middle of central cities was usually a poor one. Fortunately, this all fits together: instead of highways stringing together central cities like beads, cities would be more hanging from the highways like pendants, and so when going from A to C it would just be a matter of not getting off on the surface streets leading into B.
September 11th, 2009 at 10:31 am
I suggest that the freeways, by making it possible to drive into downtown areas quickly, also expanded the cities into much larger metro areas.
Yeah, except that didn’t really work, because thanks to congestion it turns out that a large set of alternate surface routes serving a Downtown generally works better than trying to pipe the same volume of traffic through a highway. Basically, with the highway you get a gain when people don’t actually want to travel (nights and maybe middays), and a loss when people actually do want to travel, for a net loss on a weighted basis.
September 11th, 2009 at 10:31 am
If you haven’t read “The Power Broker” by Robert Caro, http://www.amazon.com/Power-Broker-Robert-Moses-Fall/dp/0394720245 then you don’t really understand just how important this observation is.
The Power Broker is an absolutely fantastic study into the king of urban planning, Robert Moses…and how he set New York back decades through his myopic focus on building roads.
For anyone who grew up in NY, and has to live in this disgrace of a town (DC), The Power Broker is a must read if you believe that only mass transportation is the best way to aleviate (NOT SOLVE) our transportation disaster down here.
September 11th, 2009 at 10:33 am
Plus, there were no safeguards put in place to prevent illegal aliens from using the highways…
September 11th, 2009 at 10:33 am
It wasn’t always the ghetto that got bulldozed to make room for the highway. In New Orleans, the proposed Vieux Carré Riverfront Expressway would have been (naturally) a loss for preservation and for history. Thankfully, the cult of personality around Robert Moses was, by then, beginning to dissipate.
September 11th, 2009 at 10:33 am
Bottomfish,
The issue here is not population size as much as it is population density. The absolute size of metro areas may have grown, but the densities fell. This dovetails with the rise of the urban planner as technocrat and the use of zoning (and the evil FAR metric) as a means of planning.
The point here is that highway building helped to subsidize the spread of the city, something many of us have come to see as regrettable.
-g
September 11th, 2009 at 10:33 am
Aren’t those pretty much your choices, if you’re going to “[c]onnect[] one metro area to another with limited access highways”? True, there’s a third one: having highways running from the outskirts of one metro area to the outskirts of another, without any easy way to get from one such highway to another. But that would be a far worse choice than either of the other two.
Not really. Other countries manage to do it fine. Paris, London, Frankfurt, Berlin, Amsterdam, etc. don’t have major highways running through the middle of the city, instead connecting the highways through the outskirts of metro areas.
September 11th, 2009 at 10:34 am
Actually, I just don’t think there’s any good way to make dense, vibrant cities coexist with huge numbers of cars. If you build highways around the cities, you get one set of problems. If you build them through the cities, it’s a different set of problems. If you terminate the highway at the edge of the city, the city will grow up around the highway access and you’ll eventually have a third, and different, set of problems.
What we really need is teleportation.
September 11th, 2009 at 10:37 am
Classic reading on this subject (among many others): The Power Broker by Robert Caro. As good–and saddening–a read as there ever was.
September 11th, 2009 at 10:47 am
John McG!!
September 11th, 2009 at 10:47 am
“Aren’t those pretty much your choices, if you’re going to “[c]onnect[] one metro area to another with limited access highways”? True, there’s a third one: having highways running from the outskirts of one metro area to the outskirts of another, without any easy way to get from one such highway to another. But that would be a far worse choice than either of the other two.”
Beltways, sometimes known as “ring roads”, solve that particular problem.
September 11th, 2009 at 10:47 am
This thread seems like it’s coming from an alternate reality, I’m afraid. What drove intra-city highways then (and continues to drive them now) is the wholesale conversion of middle-class living to the suburban model. People, given the choice, overwhelmingly chose to live in self-owned tract homes with yards rather than multifamily housing. (And this isn’t just an american phenomenon, by the way.)
Once you have this sort of residential paradigm, the pressure for high-volume road networks into the heart of urban areas is irresistible.
Suburban voters tend to have pretty much unstoppable political power; after all they are the most prosperous and best connected parts of the electorate. Good luck convincing them to give up their yards and separate dwellings. And until you do, you’ll never be able to do away with those hideous urban highways with massive tangles of flyover ramps.
September 11th, 2009 at 10:49 am
Fwiw, they’re still trying to ram freeways through parts of Southern California. The most obvious place is in South Pasadena. However, that community is rich enough to avoid that fate for some time to come.
September 11th, 2009 at 10:50 am
Another good example of this stupidity is the destruction of Howard Street in Akron, Ohio, to make way for one of the most underused limited-access urban highways.
Chrissie Hynde sang about this “urban renewal” project in My City Was Gone, the well-known Pretenders song with the line, “Hey, ho, way to go Ohio.”
September 11th, 2009 at 10:52 am
To review the bidding, low-tech cyclist was responding to Matt’s claim that we should neither run highways through cities NOR circumvent them. So responding to low-tech cyclist by pointing out that you can use beltways/ring-roads to circumvent cities is missing the point, because that is one of the two options low-tech cyclist was noting that Matt had eliminated from consideration.
September 11th, 2009 at 10:56 am
How many of these cities with big beautiful urban freeways are filled with crumbling infrastructure everywhere else?
September 11th, 2009 at 10:57 am
jimBOB,
There are two flaws in your analysis. First, you are assuming the demand for suburbs is independent from the transportation systems we choose to subsidize, which is not a well-grounded assumption. This is actually part of a more general point, which is that the demand for suburbs is not independent from a large number of public policy decisions, regarding everything from transportation, to utilities, to zoning, and on and on.
Second, you are assuming highways are a good way of providing transportation between suburbs and central locations. Again, this turns out to be an ill-conceived idea, because congestion ends up making highways worse than a set of alternative surface routes on a weighted basis.
September 11th, 2009 at 10:57 am
To echo what Stephan @17 said, if the city is small and it’s role on the freeway is largely as an intermediate point between two larger cities, then you just run a freeway past it, with a few exits. If the city is large, then you’ll need to access it from many different directions so you don’t have to drive on surface streets all the way across it, and it will have multiple freeways connecting it to other cities, so you build a ring around it. This is what London, Paris, and Berlin look like. None of this is incompatible with dense, vibrant cores.
September 11th, 2009 at 11:03 am
so you build a ring around it. This is what London, Paris, and Berlin look like. None of this is incompatible with dense, vibrant cores.
So why, we keep asking, is MY against it?
September 11th, 2009 at 11:04 am
jimBOB: Good luck convincing them to give up their yards and separate dwellings.
Single-family homes with yards are compatible with not having ready access to a freeway. Even if a large selection of surface roads, as DTM talks about, were not an otpion, have you ever heard of “streetcar suburbs”?
September 11th, 2009 at 11:05 am
Show me where it says he’s against ring roads? Because i’m not seeing it in this post.
September 11th, 2009 at 11:06 am
So why, we keep asking, is MY against it?
Beats me. Of course, this is pretty much moot since large cities in North America already have tons of freeway, including beltways.
September 11th, 2009 at 11:06 am
We were long overdue for the next “Matt Yglesias hates cars” post.
September 11th, 2009 at 11:06 am
One other option is to run your highways underneath any major city. This is a little expensive to be sure, but hardly without precedent. It’s what Boston has done (at massive expense) and what Melbourne has to some extent done with slightly greater success.
I’d like that in New York if the price was right. A tunnel connecting the Lincoln tunnel to the Midtown tunnel, and another connecting the Holland tunnel to the Williamsburg/Manhattan/Brooklyn bridges would make a big difference. It would probably cost more than universal health care, and be more cost effective to spend the money on transit, but it does get traffic moving without killing the city.
September 11th, 2009 at 11:09 am
Sorry, I don’t get the point of this post. Is the idea just to make it hard to get around so as to punish people for living in the suburbs? It seems to me that city highways are pretty damn useful.
I live in Cleveland. On the west side you have I-90, which makes it easy to get around. On the east side, there aren’t highways, which makes it a pain in the ass. I’m not talking about traveling to outer ring suburbs, either. If you want to go from downtown to the art museum by university circle, it’s a pain in the ass. There were proposals to use stimulus money to build a highway connecting the two, which seems like a great idea. Forcing people to take the city streets out east does nothing for the midtown neighborhoods, which are total crap. White people still drive right through them on their way out to the suburbs. Except, instead of driving 65, they have to drive 35 and stop at a bunch of lights (with fucking traffic cameras too).
September 11th, 2009 at 11:09 am
Show me where it says he’s against ring roads?
I guess you could interpret “we shouldn’t [have] made circumventing existing cities such a priority of the highway system” as saying he’s against ring roads. The way you would circumvent an existing city would be to build a highway around it. The way you would give a motorist traveling from a different city access to all compass points of a city would also be to build a highway around it.
September 11th, 2009 at 11:12 am
What drove intra-city highways then (and continues to drive them now) is the wholesale conversion of middle-class living to the suburban model. People, given the choice, overwhelmingly chose to live in self-owned tract homes with yards rather than multifamily housing. (And this isn’t just an american phenomenon, by the way.)
As an adult, I’ve lived in two of the top 5 most populous metro areas in the country, and I currently live in a top 20 metro area that is much more “citified” than a lot of the places above it. In each and every instance, I’ve lived in a single family home with a yard. Each and every one of them has been well within the city limits. I guess one was sort of a suburb-in-the-city type neighborhood, but the other two are honest-to-god city neighborhoods, where you walk to most restaurants and take public because of parking difficulties, etc.
September 11th, 2009 at 11:12 am
He didn’t say he was against it, he just said it shouldn’t have been such a priority. Which, to be honest, sounds correct. And I don’t interpret circumventing to mean ring roads, necessarily. Ring roads are generally meant to service urban cores, not circumvent them.
September 11th, 2009 at 11:12 am
There’s a third flaw in JimBob’s analysis: the false choice between “multifamily buildings with no yards” and “single family tract homes by the highway.”
By the 1920s, automobile ownership was already widespread, and suburban growth was happening by leaps and bounds, but it didn’t take an auto-dependent, sprawling form. Single family homes on smallish lots, in walkable neighborhoods served by transit, was the dominant style of development – and rather than declining, our cities went through a renaissance during this period.
September 11th, 2009 at 11:14 am
Also, Matt’s intent in his line about circumventing existing cities is very unclear.
September 11th, 2009 at 11:17 am
People like suburbs, highways and segregation. If you ask people to vote on what they like, they will vote for highways, suburbs and segregation.
Yglesias can try and convince 300 million Americans to change their preferences using his little blog. Good luck.
September 11th, 2009 at 11:19 am
There’s a third flaw in JimBob’s analysis: the false choice between “multifamily buildings with no yards” and “single family tract homes by the highway.”
Yeah, I should have made it more clear my list of flaws was nonexhaustive.
Basically, once you are talking about commuter transportation into central locations, using highways starts to make less and less sense. And that is true even if those people are using cars for other purposes from or within their residential neighborhoods.
September 11th, 2009 at 11:20 am
People, given the choice, overwhelmingly chose to live in self-owned tract homes with yards rather than multifamily housing.
That’s true, everybody loves Ruby Tuesday’s and suburban tract-home living. That’s why housing in streetcar suburbs is so cheap compared to Reunion, CO.
Also why, all other things being equal, folks tend to want to take their honeymoon in someplace like Gaithersburg, MD rather than Paris, France.
September 11th, 2009 at 11:24 am
Brian Weatherson @34: One other option is to run your highways underneath any major city. This is a little expensive to be sure, but hardly without precedent. It’s what Boston has done (at massive expense).
As DTM has said a few times, the problem with freeways in downtowns is that they get congested and don’t actually speed traffic through downtown on an appropriately weighted basis, relative to much cheaper and non-neighborhood-destroying alternatives. Destroying neighborhoods is bad too, of course, and so if you have to have freeways in the downtown, then it would be better to bury them, but this is as you mention hugely expensive, and the redevelopment that would occur above the freeways can easily be botched (see the “Rose Kennedy Greenway” above I-93 in Boston that you mention).
Having highways going through downtowns promotes auto use in dense areas, which means that for a highway’s capacity to be realized, it needs associated wide roadways (at the expense of sidewalks, bike lanes, streetcar lanes, etc.) and ample parking space downtown. This is at odds with dense, vibrant, walkable city cores.
All that said, if there is a highway already going through a downtown, and it’s sunken, then covering it with buildings is a great idea, which Boston has done over I-90 in the Back Bay.
September 11th, 2009 at 11:25 am
People like suburbs, highways and segregation. If you ask people to vote on what they like, they will vote for highways, suburbs and segregation.
This is an invalid claim at that level of generality. The truth is that some people prioritize those things, some people priortize the opposite, and some people fall somewhere in the middle where their priorities are really focused on other things.
And the empirical research strongly suggests our current system is overweighted in favor of serving the people in the first group, underweighted in favor of serving the people in the second group, and causing unnecessary costs to the people in the third group even though those costs typically aren’t very transparent to those people.
But again, there are people of all kinds . . . it is just a question of whether we are properly allocating resources in light of the underlying mix, and we almost certainly are not.
September 11th, 2009 at 11:25 am
People like suburbs, highways and segregation. If you ask people to vote on what they like, they will vote for highways, suburbs and segregation.
Yglesias can try and convince 300 million Americans to change their preferences using his little blog. Good luck.
The rate of suburban growth has been slowing over the last two decades. A lot of people that grew up in suburbs are moving into newly renewed cities. I see no reason why the suburban vs urban trend won’t begin reversing itself over the next few decades. Exploding fuel prices might make this trend happen much much quicker. The current generation is going to be poorer than their parents, in all probability. The dream of a beautiful white picket fence house in the suburbs with 2 cars in the garage is going to be unattainable for a lot of us and for others like myself, its not even a dream that we want.
September 11th, 2009 at 11:27 am
What DTM @ 25 said. Though to be fair, Petey was pretty terse and on the mark with “ring roads.”
But I am confused – I thought that ring roads was precisely what Wash DC has (495) as opposed to interstates running through it, at least from north of the city.
And to me one of worst things about urban highway craze, as MY alludes to, was putting them next to waterways. I understand how this makes sense from a pure “let’s move the traffic” perspective, and the river/coastline sure is nice to see as I drive by or sit in traffic, but putting 6 or 8 lanes of interstate highway between urban residents and their local body of water was myopic planning.
September 11th, 2009 at 11:27 am
There’s actually a bunch of options to do cars without ramming freeways through cities:
1. Terminate at outskirts. Already discussed.
2. Beltways. Already discussed.
3. Subterranean exits – similar to how Boston’s Big Dig tucks the highway underground and gives you a variety of exits. Actually works quite well in a number of places, Rome is another example.
jimBOB -
You really, really can’t talk about the suburban exodus as a purely natural market phenomenon without considering the following issues:
1. The post-war housing shortage in the cities was prevented from being solved by conservative opposition to public housing – hence, there wasn’t much of a market choice to get new housing in the city.
2. Federal industrial policy deliberately pushed industry out to undeveloped areas via a mix of Federal contracts, tax advantages, and the like in an attempt to make U.S industry more A-bomb proof; hence, there were fewer jobs in the city. See Margaret Pugh O’Mara’s Cities of Knowledge for more.
3. The destruction of huge amounts of urban housing via the highways, Urban Renewal, and other programs made it even more difficult for people to find new housing in the city.
September 11th, 2009 at 11:29 am
The rate of suburban growth has been slowing over the last two decades. A lot of people that grew up in suburbs are moving into newly renewed cities.
And as the return to cities continues apace, housing prices increase driving the poor out of the urban core into the ‘burbs. This will drive up crime and drive down school quality. In two decades parents with children will be moving *into* the city because of the schools.
September 11th, 2009 at 11:31 am
> People, given the choice, overwhelmingly chose to
> live in self-owned tract homes with yards rather
> than multifamily housing. (And this isn’t just an
> american phenomenon, by the way.)
The City of Chicago had hundreds of thousands of such homes within its city limits by 1920.
Cranky
September 11th, 2009 at 11:33 am
People vote with their wallets for urban (or at least traditional suburban) neighborhoods with good transit and cultural diversity. Housing prices in areas that meet these standards are much higher than out in the sprawl-burbs.
September 11th, 2009 at 11:37 am
> Fortunately, this all fits together: instead of highways
> stringing together central cities like beads, cities would
> be more hanging from the highways like pendants, and so
> when going from A to C it would just be a matter of not
> getting off on the surface streets leading into B.
Maybe, if things had started that way, it might have worked. In hindsight however it is equally possible that we would have just ended up with a lot of towns like Breezewood, PA – possibly the most soul-destroying spot I have seen in North America – which would then have grown into cities and sucked the parent metropolis dry. I believe that is exactly what Richard J Daley (King Richard I, father of the current Mayor of Chicago) feared.
This applies to ring roads, too, which have had exactly that effect on even strong metro areas such as Chicago and have completely decimated weaker cities such as St. Louis.
Cranky
In any case the most efficient way to move large quantities of freight from A-C quickly is by rail. Trailer-on-Flat-Car (ToFC) was already in use in the 1950s and would have developed faster (probably into something like the TrailerTrain used by UPS today) if more attention had been given to multimodal transport. Long-distance trucking is a big loser, and I personally don’t know that Americans have gained all that much by confining 95% of their personal long-distance driving to soul-sucking Interstates to gain some speed.
September 11th, 2009 at 11:38 am
Actual research on preference shows that people who choose the suburbs overwhelmingly do so for two reasons: schools and crime. The advantages that suburbs have had over cities in those two measures has nothing to do with their being suburban or urban in design.
When it comes to community design, people react most favorably to what is commonly called Traditional Neighborhood Design, with houses on small lots, close to smallish streets, with front porches and destinations within walking distance.
September 11th, 2009 at 11:40 am
you are assuming the demand for suburbs is independent from the transportation systems we choose to subsidize, which is not a well-grounded assumption.
I am assuming no such thing. The two go hand-in-hand. Building a ring of suburbs causes the flight of those who can afford it out of the city core, which then creates pressure for highways to serve them, which creates the opportunity for further suburban development further out. Rinse and repeat. Eventually the balance of political power lies entirely with the remote suburbs which contain the most prosperous, well-connected people in the region.
Second, you are assuming highways are a good way of providing transportation between suburbs and central locations.
It doesn’t matter whether this is true or not so long as the perception among the suburbanites is that fat highways are necessary. And I can guarantee you it is. Here in St. Louis we’re rebuilding the major east-west artery. When they came out with the plans for closing the highway for two years while construction was in progress, you should have heard the conniptions.
September 11th, 2009 at 11:42 am
The sad thing is that New York City solved the problem of how to build limited access transportation routes without destroying neighborhoods in the Nineteenth Century — Tunnels.
If there was sufficient demand for a limited access highway through your city to support the expense of a tunnel, it should have been built. If not, then not. The policy of destroying urban neighborhoods to benefit suburban commuters was a disaster. But land was cheap and no one cared.
Someone above alluded to The Pretenders’ “My City Was Gone”. There’s a line in there about a “government that had no pride” that really sums up the matter. Though since we’re a democracy, it should really be said that this country has no pride. Wave the flag, clap for soldiers, and abandon our cities to ruin so we can live somewhere pretty and never have to look at them except through a car window at 65 mph.
God Bless America.
September 11th, 2009 at 11:45 am
have you ever heard of “streetcar suburbs”?
Yup, lived in one myself for some years. (Alas, the streetcars had been assassinated by political machinations years earlier). Trust me, the West County types that drive highway decisions/spending here would never be caught dead living in such a suburb.
September 11th, 2009 at 11:46 am
One alternative example is the German Autobahn, which connects major cities but does not run through them. Instead, the Autobahn skirts the cities and access to the inner core is on surface streets, bus and rail. It may slow down the delivery of goods because big 18-wheelers have to offload cargo on to smaller vehicles but it has the effect of preserving the integrity and aesthetics of the urban core and making it much more pedestrian and bicycle friendly. Yes, there is surface street congestion as a result but running the interstate through the middle of town doesn’t seem to reduce that anyway.
September 11th, 2009 at 11:51 am
All German cities also have large areas where cars are not allowed. Not just the big cities but even smaller towns have large pedestrian-only areas. Most of that has to do with the towns all being 600 years old, but they are beautiful.
September 11th, 2009 at 11:52 am
What people like, or think they like, is not always good for them in the long run. It’s the old old story.
September 11th, 2009 at 11:54 am
This is simply inaccurate. Suburban growth follows transportation infrastructure, not the other way around.
If there are no pre-existing highways for suburban growth to follow, development in a metropolitan area takes a very different form.
September 11th, 2009 at 11:55 am
Because, once again, this is suburban growth that followed, and was designed to be dependent upon, the highway.
September 11th, 2009 at 11:57 am
> This is simply inaccurate. Suburban growth
> follows transportation infrastructure, not
> the other way around.
joe,
You and I are generally in agreement on these threads, but here I have to diverge a bit. Back in the 1980s when the 2nd wave of postwar suburbanization was at its peak I heard too many coworkers talking about getting away from the “dirt” of the city to think that there isn’t a fair amount of racism and other-hatred involved. This was in a time period when many families still had a grandma living in “the old neighborhod” or perhaps the inner-ring 1st wave suburb where they grew up, so they did have knowledge of what city life was like. The hatred of the other was a pretty intense factor.
Cranky
September 11th, 2009 at 11:58 am
You really, really can’t talk about the suburban exodus as a purely natural market phenomenon
I’m not. I accept that the creation of our doughnut suburbs involved lots of deliberate policy choices. The fact is that it’s happened, and going forward, you have to deal with the political landscape that exists now, not the one that was nefariously razed 60 years ago.
September 11th, 2009 at 12:00 pm
> Because, once again, this is suburban growth
> that followed, and was designed to be dependent
> upon, the highway.
In that particular case the situation is more complex. The highway being rebuilt, US 40/Interstate 64 in St. Louis, was started in 1938 and patterned after the autobahn and German city throughways. Although it did serve 1920s ring suburbs, those were primarily horse suburbs for the superwealthy of the day. The trigger for flight in St. Louis was somewhat different.
Cranky
September 11th, 2009 at 12:00 pm
Of course not – they’re used to a system in which the lack of highways and gigantic parking lots means extreme inconvenience. They look at the neighborhood centers and residential streets of traditional suburbs and think how inconvenient it would be to drive everywhere there. Trust me, I know; that used to be me.
But, you see, people who live in those places don’t drive everywhere, because they are designed to be very convenient for walkers and transit riders. People who come from those places would look at your West County type suburbs and think how horribly inconvenient they must be. Three miles to get to a convenience store? A forty minute drive to a park-and-ride lot to get to the city center? You’ve got to be kidding me!
September 11th, 2009 at 12:02 pm
Cranky,
I didn’t mean to suggest that transportation concerns were the only driver of suburban growth. I was merely commenting on the relationship between those two variables, not suggesting that they were the entire story.
September 11th, 2009 at 12:02 pm
> I’m not. I accept that the creation of our
> doughnut suburbs involved lots of deliberate
> policy choices. The fact is that it’s happened,
> and going forward, you have to deal with the
> political landscape that exists now, not the
> one that was nefariously razed 60 years ago.
Which is fine, but as you note it DOES take 30-60 years to change living patterns, so it might be helpful to start thinking now about what $10/gal, $20/gal, and total unavailability of gasoline are going to do to how we live. Back in 2008 I saw people making different housing decisions at $4/gal; $10 is going to be an utter shock.
Cranky
September 11th, 2009 at 12:06 pm
Suburban growth follows transportation infrastructure, not the other way around.
Not the way it’s worked here. Suburban edge cites weren’t all built at once; it’s more like the rings of a tree. Once you have a layer of suburbs, this creates the basis for pushing out/beefing up the infrastructure so developers can create the next ring out. The process becomes inexorable as there’s so much money being made. And as population shifts to the suburbs you have unstoppable political pressure for big fat highways, both going out and in.
September 11th, 2009 at 12:06 pm
You also can’t deal with the political landscape that existed thirty years ago, when it was still possible for the sprawl system to continue apace for several decades without destroying itself.
The political landscape that exists now, as opposed to the early 1980s, is one in which the sustainable nature of suburban sprawl is becoming increasingly evident, even to those who like to live in a McMansion on an acre and half, near a highway interchange. We certainly have to account for those people, but accounting for them doesn’t mean encouraging or allowing future growth in a pattern that even they oppose.
September 11th, 2009 at 12:08 pm
Except, instead of driving 65, they have to drive 35 and stop at a bunch of lights (with fucking traffic cameras too).
Boo. Hoo. Hoo.
Oh, the humanity!
September 11th, 2009 at 12:10 pm
JimBOB,
But you see, you have to have the infrastructure in place to have that ring of suburbs. That ring is dependent upon the infrastructure, and the next “ring” begins as the farthest-out portion of that ring, dependent upon the highways and on-ramps that the first ring depends upon. You don’t get the demand for new highways and off-ramps to serve that second ring until you get enough people who have moved to the burbs and are utilizing the existing highways and infrastructure.
September 11th, 2009 at 12:11 pm
They look at the neighborhood centers and residential streets of traditional suburbs and think how inconvenient it would be to drive everywhere there.
Exactly! And these people are nothing if not thick. We’re talking strongholds of McCain/Palin voters.
Back in 2008 I saw people making different housing decisions at $4/gal; $10 is going to be an utter shock.
True dat. And once it happens you might be able to start constructively thinking about re-densifying cities. But first there’ll be grasping at straws like hydrogen cars etc.
September 11th, 2009 at 12:16 pm
>> They look at the neighborhood centers and residential
>> streets of traditional suburbs and think how
>> inconvenient it would be to drive everywhere there.
> Exactly! And these people are nothing if not thick.
> We’re talking strongholds of McCain/Palin voters.
The end result being a Route 59 (Naperville-Plainfield Road) in Naperville/Aurora Illinois being widened out to 8 lanes (10 in some places!) and rammed down into the small town of Plainfield, such that it now takes almost an hour to drive up that road from Joliet to downtown Naperville and to Ogden Road. Vastly more “convenient” than the dense network of arterials in the City of Chicago – not.
Cranky
September 11th, 2009 at 12:16 pm
And as population shifts to the suburbs you have unstoppable political pressure for big fat highways, both going out and in.
Right but you’re ignoring sustainability (and not necessarily of the tree-hugging variety). At least in the Washington DC area, 3-4 hour commutes are starting to trump the two-car garage. When one could easily commute 50 miles in less than an hour, the sprawl is inexorable. When it takes nearly an hour to travel 15 miles (e.g. NE DC -> Rockville, MD, Falls Church -> Downtown), then not so much.
Those looking to solve that problem by adding another lane are in for a whole new level of disappointment.
September 11th, 2009 at 12:20 pm
Except, instead of driving 65, they have to drive 35 and stop at a bunch of lights (with fucking traffic cameras too).
And let’s not forget the jaywalking pedestrians, local drivers who actually drive the speed limit and yield to said pedestrians, and worst of all “arrogant scofflaw cyclists” riding their evil contraptions in the *car* lane!!
September 11th, 2009 at 12:22 pm
Those looking to solve that problem by adding another lane are in for a whole new level of disappointment.
I’m not disagreeing, but I’m saying you’re swimming against a powerful political current, at least until gas hits double-figures. Even then. Suburbanites are really pig-headed.
September 11th, 2009 at 12:25 pm
Ok, jimBOB, but that means we can’t accept the premise that “People, given the choice, overwhelmingly chose to live in self-owned tract homes with yards rather than multifamily housing” without, at the very least, highly qualifying it to include the point that people’s choices are profoundly shaped by public policy.
Which also suggests that, with other kinds of public policy, you could shift it back.
September 11th, 2009 at 12:26 pm
Man, I didn’t know about the proposed Vieux LeCarre expressway. Wow. Let’s all be thankful that the South Street Expressway in Philly never got built, nor the Lower or Mid-Manhattan Expressways. (Given the cross-bronx, major deegan, etc., i’m not sure building the upper-manhattan expressway would have done that much additional damage.) And that the Brooklyn Heights Ass’n managed to get the BQE cantilevered along the ridge, rather than having it go thru Brooklyn Heights. (Too bad half of cobble hill got cut-off, though.)
September 11th, 2009 at 12:27 pm
I’m not disagreeing, but I’m saying you’re swimming against a powerful political current, at least until gas hits double-figures. Even then. Suburbanites are really pig-headed.
Sure, just pointing out that in *some* regions, it’s not necessarily about the gas prices (though that’s sure to speed the rate of change)–it’s the congestion. In the greater Washington metropolitan area, the disease is beginning to look as if it’s its own cure.
September 11th, 2009 at 12:28 pm
If there’s a solution that does not involve running a highway through the downtown, DC is not it. The GW Parkway does a decent job of running along the city without running through it, but getting downtown from certain points north is a whole lot of fail.
Storrow Drive, the FDR Drive, and the West Side highway all work well from my perspective without destroying anyone’s neighborhood.
September 11th, 2009 at 12:30 pm
I agree about using existing streets, large boulevards and ring highways to transport people in and out of cities. It is interesting to look at the impact that tearing down freeways has on cities. In NY, SF and Boston removing elevated highways has revitalized the waterfront areas of those cities. There is a lesson here.
September 11th, 2009 at 12:42 pm
Left out of this discussion so far is the influence of zoning and especially lot size regulations in the areas surrounding cities. The suburban mess is due at least as much to lax planning as to the existence of interurban highways. Growth can easily be contained if people stand up to the large land owners and developers. My own town in RI remained rural thanks to a five-acre minimum imposed over the howls of progress-first types. We also banded together to stop a boondoggle of an interstate from being built to cut our town in half.
September 11th, 2009 at 12:43 pm
#10. What “destroyed” much of Little Italy in Chicago in the 60s was not the building of an expressway, but the construction of the campus of the University of Illinois Chicago.
Actually, I’d say that the construction of the Eisenhower and the Circle interchange started the destruction of (most of) Little Italy (along with most of Greektown). The construction of the U of I finished off virtually all of Little Italy.
The Eisenhower and the Circle ravaged the north end of Little Italy and most of Greek Town (all that is left of Greektown today is a 2 or 3 block long strip of greek businesses (mostly restaurants), mostly on the west side of Halsted Street, with much of the east side of Halsted covered in surface parking lots (and a great view of the Dan Ryan expressway).
With only part of Little Italy eaten up by the Eisenhower, much of it survived. Until the U of I came and destroyed that as well, leaving only a short stretch of Italian restaurants on Taylor Street.
Both the Greeks and Italians got screwed by Daley.
If only it had been built in Garfield Park, U of I could have rebuilt a weak community instead of destroying a strong one.
And, so the Blacks got screwed worse than anyone by Mayor Daley. He really hated black people.
September 11th, 2009 at 12:47 pm
Storrow Drive, the FDR Drive, and the West Side highway all work well from my perspective without destroying anyone’s neighborhood.
Opportunity cost. Think of what could have been built there instead, and the foregone tax revenues. Would you like to see the Embarcadero Freeway and Harbor Drive go back up again?
September 11th, 2009 at 1:01 pm
Storrow Drive isn’t actually a highway. It’s got traffic lights and intersections, and you can cross it on foot to get at the waterfront.
The West Side Highway, as I understand it, basically cuts off the city from that waterfront, and that’s a g-d shame.
September 11th, 2009 at 1:03 pm
The construction of the U of I finished off virtually all of Little Italy.
Let’s observe a moment of silence for the Maxwell Street Market, another victim of the U of I and city planners. That really was an irretrievable loss.
September 11th, 2009 at 1:09 pm
The GW Parkway does a decent job of running along the city without running through it, but getting downtown from certain points north is a whole lot of fail.
Could you elaborate? What’s wrong with Connecticut Ave, North Capitol Street, and Wisconsin Ave? They all seem to move during rush hour; actually–in my experience–they move with less congestion than SW Freeway or I-66…
September 11th, 2009 at 1:17 pm
Burying the massive freeway running through the middle of Boston has been great. I suspect that over 20 years or so, given taxes from new business growth and incremental increases to property values, it will turn out to be a profitable use of money. It’s hard to overstate how much it has changed the waterfront of downtown Boston.
September 11th, 2009 at 1:23 pm
Now that I think about it, I can’t think of a single city in Europe that I know something about, that has a freeway cutting through it. What you see are ring roads for the largest cities like Rome, which lead you to boulevards which in turn lead you to streets, etc.
Of course, the Europeans never had the vast open lands to lead them to the hubris of thinking they could have viable, vibrant cities centered around a transportation system based largely upon private automobiles and artificially cheap parking for them.
Look at your basic European city… the closer you get to the center city, the more expensive and hard-to-find parking is. This is an incentive to park your car somewhere and take public transit, which makes life easier for everyone involved. Less car traffic in city center = more pedestrian-friendly culture = less pollution = less noise = easier to get around.
On the other hand, here in the USA where we think it is our god-given right to consume as much petroleum as possible and Jesus wants us to take our cars everywhere, we think we have the right to cheap or free parking and plenty of it. Which means that a substantial amount of land in our cities – especially the further west you go – is dedicated to urban freeways and parking.
September 11th, 2009 at 1:25 pm
The West Side Highway, as I understand it, basically cuts off the city from that waterfront, and that’s a g-d shame.
That’s not really true anymore. The West Side Highway is now basically West Street from the Battery to 59 Street. It is a 6-8 lane boulevard which can be crossed relatively easily at frequent intervals. There has been a revitalization of the West Side Waterfront complete with parks and bike/walking paths as a result of the collapse and subsequent removal of the old elevated West Side Highway.
September 11th, 2009 at 1:44 pm
> Of course, the Europeans never had the vast open
> lands to lead them to the hubris of thinking they
> could have viable, vibrant cities centered around
> a transportation system based largely upon private
> automobiles and artificially cheap parking for them.
Methinks you take this a bit too far. Certainly in the UK Midlands many cities have developed a ring of automobile-dependent suburbs around them. Big-box stores and malls, too.
Cranky
September 11th, 2009 at 2:05 pm
And that the Brooklyn Heights Ass’n managed to get the BQE cantilevered along the ridge, rather than having it go thru Brooklyn Heights. (Too bad half of cobble hill got cut-off, though.)
The Cobble Hill cut-through is a real problem in that it severed the western side from the rest of Brooklyn and basically made it its own little island. I think it would be great if we could cover the sunken part of the BQE that runs along Cobble Hill, but of course no one wants to pay for it….
And, while I’m dreaming, I’d love to cover the BQE that runs under the Promenade with a graduated series of steps that would run down to the currently being built Brooklyn Bridge Park…
September 11th, 2009 at 2:05 pm
Just to clarify, I’m not arguing that there aren’t some people who prefer suburbs for their inherent attributes, nor that transportation policy was the only factor leading to the flight from American central cities in the second part of the 20th Century.
On the other hand, I think it is a fundamental mistake to see the political situation as unchangeable, and indeed as unchanging. For one thing, the underlying demand situation isn’t static, and not just energy prices but things like an aging population, more tolerant generations of young adults, and so on are altering the underlying demand mix. For another, it was never just the new suburbanites behind road-building: crucially it was a coalition between the new suburbanites, rural people, and certain industrial interests. And the other two legs of that stool (the rural population and the relevant industrial interests) are now in steady decline.
Indeed, at the risk of throwing gasoline on the fire, the dynamic at the national political level reflects exactly this situation: the Nixon-to-Bush II Republican Party was built on that basic coalition of rural people, certain industrial interests, and the more culturally conservative suburbanites. But that coalition has been shrinking–indeed, significant parts of it are literally dying off–and it is now below the point of viability.
Hence, the Republican Party is either going to adapt and start competing more effectively with groups like urbanites and tolerant young adults, or it will keep losing elections. And either way, there will be a policy shift.
September 11th, 2009 at 2:08 pm
Storrow Drive, the FDR Drive, and the West Side highway all work well from my perspective without destroying anyone’s neighborhood.
Not that well, in that they all cut off their adjoining neighborhoods from the waterfront. If you live in the Village, for example, that means there’s six lanes of fast moving traffic and a large median strip between you and Hudson River Park.
September 11th, 2009 at 2:14 pm
Storrow Drive isn’t actually a highway. It’s got traffic lights and intersections, and you can cross it on foot to get at the waterfront.
You’re confusing Storrow Drive, on the Boston side, with Memorial Drive, on the Cambridge side. Storrow Drive is a narrow, sharply-turning, left-exit-infested strip of fail.
September 11th, 2009 at 2:19 pm
JimBOB: Suburbanites are really pig-headed.
ibc: Sure, just pointing out that in *some* regions, it’s not necessarily about the gas prices (though that’s sure to speed the rate of change)–it’s the congestion.
I think voters in L.A. have finally begun to recognize this as the growing Metro rail system have shown public transit to be viable in Southern California and congestion has continued to be horrible as the city grows, especially in the parts without mass transit (particularly the Westside). Proposition R (sales tax increase to fund transit) passed in November with 2/3 of the vote, and that was from voters across the entire county, not just the central urban aras. Westside politicians like Zev Yaroslavsky and Henry Waxman, who are the reasons why there is no mass transit on the Westside today, are now proudly (and amnesiatically) touting the expansion of the subway to the Westside.
September 11th, 2009 at 2:34 pm
I think what a lot of people pooh-pooh’ing the west side highway and storrow drive are forgetting is that cars do actually need to go somewhere and do need an effective means of getting from one side of the city to another. Storrow Drive isn’t perfect, but it does a decent job. The compromise seems to be the decision to use the banks of the charles as a park rather than being used for commercial development. That seems to be the best one can do under the circumstances.
September 11th, 2009 at 2:39 pm
Just wanted to start by thanking Cranky for mentioning Trailer-On-Flat-Car. It was a beautiful idea, although before my time, that was regrettably killed in its infancy.
I live in the 35th largest MSA in the country (wooo, Hampton Roads baby!) and I’d like to think some of our success in beating powerhouses like Dayton, OH and Albuquerque has been the existence of a highway system that cuts rings around city areas rather than directly through them (excepting 264 neatly bisecting Portsmouth). Maybe one day we’ll also have comprehensive public transit scheme (Ride the Tide!), and maybe one day pigs will fly out of my ass, but until then I find 64 and its myriad exchanges to be quite sufficient.
September 11th, 2009 at 2:58 pm
I think what a lot of people pooh-pooh’ing the west side highway and storrow drive are forgetting is that cars do actually need to go somewhere and do need an effective means of getting from one side of the city to another.
No, people actually need to go somewhere and need an effective means of getting from one side of the city to the other. Cars don’t “need” anything anymore than a toaster or a refrigerator does. The more space and resources are devoted to cars, which are relatively inefficient as they take up a lot of space and energy per person moved, the less is available to move people in other, potentially more efficient ways such as by subway, bus, tram, trolley, bike, footpath, etc.
September 11th, 2009 at 3:17 pm
Transport modality is probably not all that related to density rates. Northeastern urban manufacturing cores were emptying out early in the 20th century.
Many of these urban histories ignore the Depression and WWII as factors in the post war housing market. No new stock, deferred maintenance and heavy use over twenty years is going to lead to some serious pent up demand.
September 11th, 2009 at 3:37 pm
I think what a lot of people pooh-pooh’ing the west side highway and storrow drive are forgetting is that cars do actually need to go somewhere and do need an effective means of getting from one side of the city to another.
No, we aren’t forgetting this. Boston for example already has the Pike and Memorial Drive as rapid routes that are very close to and are parallel to Storrow Drive. There’s no reason why a highway has to go right next to a river and destroy the some of the most desirable real estate in a city.
And even though we aren’t forgetting this, it’s wrong. *Cars* don’t need to get from one side of the city to the other, *people* do. And in dense urban environments, transit is often a more socially efficient way of getting people from one side of a city to the other than cars are.
Just as people forget that the purpose of an economy is to serve the people in that economy rather than simply to become larger for its own sake, people forget that the purpose of a transportation system is to transport people (and goods), not vehicles.
September 11th, 2009 at 4:26 pm
The West Side Highway got built there because of the then funky-ass river. Docks, warehouses, industry, polluted water & bad smells. Of course it (and the elevated freight rail line) were obsolete when ground was broken. It was also apparently built with Popsicle sticks.
September 11th, 2009 at 8:16 pm
You’re right, I am.
Interesting comparison to made between those two.
September 11th, 2009 at 8:44 pm
[...] Matthew Yglesias » The Cost of Urban Freeways [...]
September 14th, 2009 at 10:19 am
[...] those people who scoff at the drive to tear down urban freeways: Matthew Yglesias points to a study showing that a highway pushed through a central city causes 18 percent of the population to flee. [...]
September 14th, 2009 at 11:33 am
“Both the Greeks and Italians got screwed by Daley
….
And, so the Blacks got screwed worse than anyone by Mayor Daley.”
Yep, pretty much all post war public policy has been about breaking up ethnic white and black political power.
Bunch of uppity Irish Catholics or Blacks threatening your WASPy political power? Make sure their smartest kids go to Harvard rather than Notre Dame or Howard and put a freeway where their neighborhood used to be. See: Chicago, Detroit, etc.
September 15th, 2009 at 1:46 am
psst “President [Eisenhower]’s vision was that the freeways would go around cities, as on the autobahn.” http://www.tfhrc.gov/pubrds/03may/05.htm
We in the cities wanted them. D’oh!